Duff swayed by assurances of first-team football

A reluctance to be rotated by Jose Mourinho persuaded Damien Duff to join Newcastle United, where Glenn Roeder has assured him he is unlikely to find himself seated on the substitutes' bench.

After training with his new team-mates yesterday morning for the first time since his £5m transfer, the former Chelsea left-winger was driven to St James' Park for a press conference and seemed startled that several hundred Newcastle fans had turned up to greet him.

"I'm 27 and I want to play football," said Duff, who finished last season struggling to get a game. "For my first 2½ years at Chelsea I did, but in the last three or four months there were problems and I had a feeling I wouldn't be guaranteed a lot of football this season. I had a great relationship with people at Chelsea and I took it on the chin, but the last few months were a bit of a struggle."

Roeder, who conducts extensive research into the personalities of potential signings, was reassured when he first spoke to Duff. "Damien's enthusiasm bounced down the phone," he said. "I couldn't have wished to make a better first signing. Getting him is a major coup; we've signed a player other top clubs wanted.

"We've landed one of the best, if not the best, wide player in the Premiership. And it's so refreshing in the modern game to see a top, top player who wants to play all the time, not just some of the time.

"It's fantastic to see a modern player with the character to say 'Yes I could stay but not play all the time at a club that might well win the league but I'll instead decide to play regularly for a club trying to win a piece of silverware'. Damien has stood up for what he's believed in."

Such principles have been rewarded by a lucrative five-year contract understood to give Duff a salary in the region of £70,000 a week. Indeed Newcastle's renowned generosity when it comes to player remuneration perhaps partly explains why they secured the Irish international's services ahead of several domestic and foreign suitors including Tottenham and Liverpool.

Yet if Liverpool's enthusiasm for deploying him on the right was a disincentive to moving to Anfield, Duff simply refused to countenance joining Chelsea's London rivals. "As a Chelsea player I couldn't join Spurs," he reflected, apparently seriously.

Nevertheless the ties that bound him to Stamford Bridge seemed to have loosened when Duff, who made his name at Blackburn where as a 16-year-old he was promoted to train with Alan Shearer and other members of Rovers' 1995 Premiership-winning side, admitted: "I'm more excited to sign for Newcastle than Chelsea.

"It feels special," he explained. "With Chelsea and Blackburn it [St James'] was an unbelievable place to come as an away player; it's possibly the most passionate place in England to play. I may be disappointing Liverpool supporters in Ireland but my heart just said Newcastle."

Even so he deliberated for 48 hours. "I took a couple of days [to make the decision]," he said. "I spoke to the gaffer and guys I know here like Scott Parker, Stephen Carr and Shay Given but I haven't come to make friends, I've come to play football."

This will entail supplying crosses for, among others, the two new attacking signings Freddy Shepherd, Newcastle's chairman, hopes to announce in the next fortnight. "We're keeping our cards close to our chest but two more players will come, I'm sure of that," said Roeder.

Although Duff bridled when declining to confirm his Ireland colleague Shay Given's weekend assertion that he is "hungry" to prove people at Chelsea wrong, deep down he must be aware that sceptics are querying whether he is past his best.

Roeder certainly does not figure among them. "Lots of players don't reach their peak until they're 27," he said before stepping out on to a sun-drenched St James' pitch where fans, buoyed by Saturday's Intertoto Cup win against Lillestrom, launched into "There's only one Glenn Roeder".

If Roeder has long been popular with Toon Army foot soldiers of a certain age who watched him captain Newcastle in the 1980s, Shepherd, who does not always see eye to eye with his managers on transfer policy, tends to provoke rather more mixed reactions. Yesterday, though, those fans waiting in the stands to serenade Duff proved sweetness and light when the chairman strode out of the tunnel, with several even demanding his autograph.

Momentarily it seemed there might be a market for replica shirts emblazoned with 'Freddy Shepherd No1' but, nothing if not down to earth, Duff injected an element of realism. "Obviously we're not kidding ourselves," he said. "It's a massive job ahead and we know we're not going to be challenging for the Premiership this season.

"But I'm here for five years, Newcastle are going in the right direction and I've come to compete for trophies."